A recent study suggests that Neandertals shared speech and
language with modern humans
Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that our close
cousins, the Neandertals, were much more similar to us than imagined even a
decade ago. But did they have anything like modern speech and language? And if
so, what are the implications for understanding present-day linguistic
diversity? The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen
researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson argue in their paper in Frontiers
in Language Sciences that modern language and speech can be traced back to the
last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million
years ago.